Kids Search Engines

The services below are designed primarily to serve the needs of children, either in focus, or by filtering out sites that some parents and teachers might find inappropriate for kids. These usually include sites that deal with explicit sexual matters, porn sites, violence, hate speech, gambling and drug use.

Major Children’s Guides & Directories

Ask Jeeves is a unique service where you enter a question, and Ask Jeeves tries to point you to the right web page that provides an answer. At Ask Jeeves For Kids, answers have been vetted for appropriateness. Also, if Ask Jeeves cannot answer a question, it pulls results from various search engines in its metacrawler mode. At Ask Jeeves For Kids, no site that is on the CyberPatrol block list is supposed to be listed.

The Kids Directory is a listing of over 20,000 kid friendly websites that were hand picked by employees of Looksmart subsidiary Net Nanny and vetted for quality. Looksmart also offers a safe search of the entire web, using Net Nanny software to filter Wisenut search results, as well as a free toolbar that uses the same service.

Yahoo for kids, designed for ages 7 to 12. Sites are hand-picked to be appropriate for children. Also, unlike normal Yahoo, searches will not bring back matched found by crawling the web, if there is no match from within the Yahooligan listings. This prevents possibly objectionable sites from slipping onto the screen. Additionally, adult-oriented banner advertising will not appear within the service. Yahooligans is the oldest major directory for children, launched in March 1996.

Filtering Options

Most major search engines get their listings by crawling the web, rather than through human review and categorization, as with the sites listed above. This means its easy for possibly objectionable material to appear in search results.

As a solution, most major search engines offer some type of filtering ability. It’s meant to keep out porn content and other material that most might not want children to encounter.

Filtering and Blocking Software

Filtering software works across the entire web, not just for search results. Most filtering software provides a fair amount of control for parents to determine what it and is not allowable content. Cyber Patrol and Net Nanny are two of the most popular of these programs.

Cyber Patrol relies on an extensive categorized list of web sites to allow parents to determine which sites are allowable or not. Content is sourced by a team of 40+ professional researchers, automated tools and customer submissions to gather the most widely accessed content on the Internet. These lists are updated frequently. Parents can also control whether individual web sites are allowed or not.

The program can filter web pages, newsgroups, chat rooms and other internet resources, and can be used to limit online time, create user logs and so on.

Looksmart acquired Net Nanny in April 2004 and added porn-free web search to the product shortly thereafter. The product provides a wide variety of parental controls, including blocking content based on content, URL, or ratings.

In addition to blocking web pages, the program allows selective blocking of access to chat, instant messaging, internet games and newsgroups. The program can also be configured to prevent illegal downloading of copyrighted or obscene material.

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